A living system: A different perspective on Communication

Parmonia
6 days ago
5 min read

There's a topic that gets talked about a lot and is understood very little. We talk about channels, tools, frequency, and formats. We build protocols, style guides, and tone frameworks. And yet, in most of the organisations we've known and accompanied, communication remains a permanent source of friction, misunderstanding and distance.

Why? Because we rarely talk about its essence. About why it exists. About its ontology.

That's the conversation we want to open today.

The Questions We Hear Most

Over years of working with organisations across different countries, cultures and industries, 3 questions come up with striking consistency:

How do we define communication within our organisation? How do we know if it's working? How do we make it consistent and standardised?

These are legitimate questions, born from a real need: reducing noise, aligning teams, building culture. But they contain a premise worth questioning: the idea that communication can — and should — be standardised.

Our answer, after years of learning through lived experience, is clear: communication, at its core, cannot be standardised. It can be understood. And from that understanding, it can be improved.

Communication and Information: A Distinction That Matters

Before going further, there's a distinction that's rarely made explicit, yet changes everything: communicating is not the same as informing.

Informing means transmitting a piece of data, a fact, or an instruction. It's unidirectional, can be efficient, and yes — it can be standardised. A quarterly results email informs. A process manual informs. A notification informs.

Communicating, on the other hand, means creating a space of shared meaning between two or more people. It requires intention, context, listening, and a kind of presence that cannot be automated or encoded in a template. Genuine communication always involves whole human beings — with their history, their values, their emotions, and their culture — and, for that reason, it is by definition multiple and non-replicable.

When organisations confuse information with communication, they build systems that are very efficient at transmitting data and very ineffective at generating understanding, trust and shared action.

Communication as a Living System

At Parmonia, we understand and apply communication as a living system: something that evolves, adapts and transforms as the people, teams and contexts that inhabit it change. It's not a linear process. It has no finish line. And it doesn't exist independently of those who practice it.

Understanding that is not a minor detail: it's the foundation. It's not just about adapting a message to the right channel or recipient. It's about understanding communication in its depth — in relation to each person's and each organisation's uses, identity and culture — and from there, defining, implementing and improving it with honesty, transparency and the respect that every genuine process requires.

Besides, there's one variable that is almost always underestimated: time.

How many times have we heard — or lived — situations where the message was right, the intention was genuine, but the moment was wrong? "The timing isn't right." "You did it at the wrong moment." "Watch your tone." Timing and tone are not matters of form. They are constitutive parts of the act of communicating. A well-crafted message delivered at the wrong moment doesn't communicate — it interrupts, confuses, or worse, damages.

What a Leadership Transition Taught Us About Bond

A few years ago, we accompanied an organisation going through its initial growth. The company had invested in a robust internal communication strategy: digital platforms, all-hands meetings, feedband ack channels. Technically, everything was in place.

And yet, teams felt uninformed, without any real connection, meaning or purpose.

When we sat down to listen to leaders, to middle managers, to people at every level, we found something the channels couldn't show: the bond between the leadership and the teams had been deep, built over years of genuine trust. Nevertheless, the leadership, though capable and well-intentioned, was communicating from a transactional place, without drawing on the trust and bond already built.

The problem wasn't the communication. It was the lack of understanding of the relationships and bonds through which communication was happening.

That experience confirmed something that has guided our work ever since: the type of bond determines the type of communication that's possible.

The Three Types of Communicational Bond

In organisational settings, we identify 3 types of bonds from which communication is built — or attempted:

The transactional bond, where communication is instrumental and surface-level. What's necessary to complete tasks gets exchanged. It's efficient in the short term, but fragile: under any tension or uncertainty, it breaks easily.

The personal bond, where communication has meaning and direction. The other person is recognised as a human being, not just a role. There is real listening. This type of bond allows teams to navigate difficult moments with greater cohesion.

The deep bond, where communication is purposeful. It's grounded in trust built over time, in mutual knowledge, and in commitment to something larger than individual tasks. From here, what's communicated carries weight, resonance and the capacity to transform.

None of these is inherently "correct or incorrect". What matters — for every organisation, team and leader — is to know what type of bond they're communicating from today, and what type they want to communicate from.

The Responsibility of Leading Through Communication

There's an asymmetry that can't be ignored: in organisations, not everyone communicates from the same position of influence. Those who lead carry a particular responsibility. Their communication doesn't just transmit information — it builds or destroys the culture, opens or closes conversations, generates security or uncertainty. Sometimes with a single sentence. Sometimes with silence.

That's why, when we accompany communication improvement processes, we always start from the same place: from what kind of bond, from what values, and from what self-awareness is the person leading actually communicating? A team's communication is, in large part, a reflection of the communication of its leader.

So, How Do You "Standardize" It?

Back to the original question: how do you "standardise" communication?

You cannot standardise the act of communication because it is inherently human, context-dependent, and unique to each interaction. Instead, what you can create are agreements—shared frameworks that define how we wish to communicate, what values we hold in our relationships, and the types of connections we want to foster within our organisation, based on mutual understanding rather than imposed rules.

They're built through lived experience, with honesty and transparency, with the right emotional awareness, and with the time that every genuine process requires.

At Parmonia, we accompany that process by integrating all the variables of the system — culture, identity, bonds, context, leadership — so that communication is not only efficient, but sustainable and real.